Ah, to be a carefree young man in a cozy sweater, hoisting an enormous spider crab

Happy 100th Birthday Sir David! Short clip from a film with Sir David Attenborough featuring @ellafcole.bsky.social explaining research in @wythamwoods.bsky.social into how Great Tits adjust behaviour during incubation to fine-tune hatching date: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGjL...

found this guy on Tiktok who has discovered carpenter's speed squares make an insanely satisfying noise when you bounce them off tires or wood, called @lostcoastedc on there

We need a Ghostbusters rewrite where one stubborn EPA regulator is all that stands in the way of Big Tech-funded ghost resurrection technology destroying the world

David Robert Grimes (@drg.bsky.social) made an Instagram reel calling me a "small-brained" idiot because my name is similar to Paul Saladino, the person who actually made the video Grimes was criticizing. It's such a dumb and surreal sign of our times. www.instagram.com/reels/DW5xGD...

New Open Access book edited by Cristina Moya @hyperadapthyrax.bsky.social and Wolfgang Wagner on identity and culture. Many great chapter by great folks. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

The natural selection of bad scientists.

The normative fraud that Errington describes is something I've seen my whole career. A biologist once told me, if p is very small, it can't be a false positive. Teams condition on null being false, see anything that makes p small as truth-seeking. These traditions spread bc they get you published.

Conference update emails for #HBES2026 and #CESRabat will be sent soon. In the meantime, updated programs are live on both conference websites: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/hbes2026 airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026 Check them out! @ces2026.bsky.social @hbes2026.bsky.social

What about we strike and don't give our talks?

My talk is in parallel to yours: same boat, same feelings. I was jokingly suggesting that all of our panel members should just pre-record our talks (and the Q&A too 😅) and just attend the "4 decades" panel.

Got the program for @ces2026.bsky.social. Looks amazing, but it's a genuine TRAVESTY that the panel on "40 decades of cultural evolution" is just another parallel session and not on the main plenary stage. Rob Boyd's talk conflicts with mine, and I encourage everyone to skip me to go see Rob.

Stalin fundamentally crippled Soviet #science in the 1930s and almost a century later it still hasn't recovered. That's what Trump, RFK Jr., Vought, and MAGA are doing right now to the United States.

This was really well done and worth a watch.

Big news! The 14th ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (CI 2026) will be held September 27-30, 2026, at the Virginia Tech Institute for Advanced Computing near Washington, DC. I'm excited to be a program co-chair this year. ci.acm.org/2026/ Papers and abstracts due 8 June. Check it out!

What is the future of international politics? Welcome to a neo-royalist order...the video! Thanks Georgetown for putting this together. It was super fun to make. Enjoy. @cgesgeorgetown.bsky.social youtu.be/300k0WzYnqI?...

Applications now open for the UNIL Summer School on Modelling for Evolutionary Biology (31 Aug–5 Sep 2026, Lausanne)! For PhD & postdocs interested in formal approaches to evolutionary ecology (incl. social evo, life-history, species interactions). Scholarships available, Pls RP! shorturl.at/fo1GA

If only there was some *extremely recent* event where we saw what happens when you put a bunch of people on a boat with a communicable disease. But alas, nothing even remotely like that happened in the last, say, six years so we just don't know...

Looks like Harvard is making more bad decisions on behalf of the ruling class. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

What makes adaptive decision-making possible? New preprint connecting cognitive, social, biological, and computational views! w/ Dorst, FeldmanHall, @smfleming.bsky.social, @catehartley.bsky.social, Gottlieb, Lejarraga, Müller-Trede, @angelaradulescu.bsky.social, and Rosati osf.io/preprints/ps...

In France, if you want to build a home above a certain size, you’re legally required to use a licensed architect. Can you guess what that size is

In the Stanford Daily today. stanforddaily.com/2026/04/13/a...

My one-hour special “Rick Steves Iran: Yesterday and Today,” which helps humanize 90 million Iranian people, is streaming free and ad-free at www.ricksteves.com/watch-iran.

I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes. osf.io/preprints/so...

You know what? I'll admit it. The credible threat by a madman to wipe out a nation of 90 million people for basically no reason (presumably using nuclear weapons) successfully distracted me. I am now distracted.

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

"In temperate climates all over the world, most people wear pants. Some wear shorts, some wear skirts, and some wear only purple undies, but one cannot deny the tremendous popularity of pants...What selective processes favored this cumbersome garment you had to put on one leg at a time?"

I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes. osf.io/preprints/so...

The only April Fools shenanigans I am tolerating today is the normally very serious subreddit r/AskHistorians overflowing with AITA posts about historical figures.

Scandinavian Mesolithic hunter-gatherers abstractly engraved bones & other materials. What can we learn from their visual complexity? New paper w @ll-herskind.bsky.social , @helenamiton.bsky.social & @felixthehauskat.bsky.social . (doi.org/10.1016/j.ja...). 1/

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/o... This Ezra Klein piece on how the adopters are using— being used by?— LLMs is horrifying. It hardens my resistance to ever turning one of these toys on at the same time that it makes me more sure that I'm going to be completely out of step and behind as a result.

Question for the Bsky hive mind: what’s the most batshit pop Evolutionary Psychology study you’ve ever come across? Particularly interested in examples in the area of female parental investment, but I’ll take others too …

Needing some relief from the world, I'm seeing more live music at the highest rate since my kids were born. It's great.

And so it begins...

Perfect

A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels: www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a... Deadline: May 4th, 2026

how it started/how it's going

Of all the analogies, this one about horses is the dumbest.

I've changed my mind - I think 'population collapse with the survivors remaining enslaved to the whims of their owners' makes horses a brilliant analogy for what happens if fully capable human-like AI ever really did take over our jobs.

Of all the analogies, this one about horses is the dumbest.

Wimsatt was my PhD advisor's advisor, and his work runs deep through much of my work. One of the greats.

Kansas is sending letters to trans people telling them that their licenses will be revoked as of tomorrow and that they risk arrest for driving on a suspended license. This is pure cruelty. www.erininthemorning.com/p/kansas-sen...

Interested in using my textbook, Modeling Social Behavior, but wishing code was in a more general programming language than NetLogo? The incomparable Ben Fried has translated all modeling code into JULIA, utilizing the excellent Agents.jl package. github.com/BenjaFried/m...

Interested in using my textbook, Modeling Social Behavior, but wishing code was in a more general programming language than NetLogo? The incomparable Ben Fried has translated all modeling code into JULIA, utilizing the excellent Agents.jl package. github.com/BenjaFried/m...

New preprint with @psmaldino.bsky.social on the evolution of similarity-biased learning: osf.io/preprints/so... This mathematical treatment both simplifies and extends our previous simulation treatment of the subject: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Great thread by @apvelilla.bsky.social about our new paper: "A Demographic Theory of Similarity-Biased Social Learning." We use mathematical modeling to explore the functional role played by identity markers in how we learn from others, and in the evolution of social learning more generally.

Short circuiting the learning process is the whole point of #AI. Users offload the "simple" or "mundane" thinking that nurtures growth. Students borrow its "understanding" and think that understanding is thiers. Use at the risk of stupidity. #academicsky phys.org/news/2026-02...

I'm thrilled to be joining the External Faculty at @csh.ac.at! Looking forward to my visit there later this Spring.

Hey linguists -- chickens can distinguish bouba and kiki: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...